Revision Quotes

• Half my life is an act of revision.

  John Irving

  Life, Writing, Half

  John Irving (2016). “Trying to Save Piggy Sneed: 20th Anniversary Edition”, p.14, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

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• Every success story is a tale of constant adaption, revision and change.

  Richard Branson

  Change, Stories, Tales

  FaceBook post by Richard Branson from Jul 22, 2015

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• If a teacher told me to revise, I thought that meant my writing was a broken-down car that needed to go to the repair shop. I felt insulted. I didn't realize the teacher was saying, 'Make it shine. It's worth it.' Now I see revision as a beautiful word of hope. It's a new vision of something. It means you don't have to be perfect the first time. What a relief!

  Naomi Shihab Nye

  Beautiful, Teacher, Writing

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• Revision is not going back and fussing around, but going forward into the process of creation

  May Sarton

  Creation, Process, Fussing

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• Embrace the melancholic voice completely in the drafting stages, to explore it for all it's worth. Then, in revision, privilege craft over pure feeling. Write the work that someone besides you will want to read.

  David Starkey

  Writing, Voice, Feelings

  Source: andreaauten.wordpress.com

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• Students need to be reminded that revision isn't merely making a few cosmetic changes. Revision is seeing and then reseeing our words and practicing strategies that make a difference in our writing.

  Georgia Heard

  Writing, Differences, Making A Difference

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• Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

  Bernard Malamud

  Writing, Pleasure, Exquisite

  "Reflections of a Writer: Long Work, Short Life". The New York Times, March 20, 1988.

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• Revision is not the end of the creative process, but a new beginning. It's a chance not just to clean up and edit, but to open up and discover. The energetic prose comes about from all the energy that went into crafting it, I suppose.

  John Dufresne

  New Beginnings, Creative, Energy

  Source: therumpus.net

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• It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer.

  Albert Einstein

  Inspirational, Motivational, Leadership

  Albert Einstein (2015). “Bite-Size Einstein: Quotations on Just About Everything from the Greatest Mind of the Twentieth Century”, p.19, St. Martin's Press

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• I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Writing, Pencils, Erasers

  Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1973). “Strong opinions”, McGraw-Hill Companies

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• I love revisions...We can't go back and revise our lives, but being allowed to go back and revise what we have written comes closest.

  Katherine Paterson

  Writing, Our Lives, Closest

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• The best advice I can give on this is, once it's done, to put it away until you can read it with new eyes. Finish the short story, print it out, then put it in a drawer and write other things. When you're ready, pick it up and read it, as if you've never read it before. If there are things you aren't satisfied with as a reader, go in and fix them as a writer: that's revision.

  Neil Gaiman

  Writing, Eye, Giving

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• The writer’s life is a life of revisions.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Life Is

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• Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one’s fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to reform it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

  Bernard Malamud

  Writing, Ideas, Reform

  "Reflections of a Writer: Long Work, Short Life". The New York Times, March 20, 1988.

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• I rewrote the ending of 'Farewell to Arms' 39 times before I was satisfied.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Farewell, Writing, Arms

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• Half my life is an act of revision; more than half the act is performed with small changes.

  John Irving

  Small Changes, Half, Life Is

  John Irving (2016). “Trying to Save Piggy Sneed: 20th Anniversary Edition”, p.14, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

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• Revision plays a very large role in writing. Sometimes it seems to be all revision. And the longer I write, the more I revise-until it is completely right.

  Ellen Hunnicutt

  Writing, Play, Roles

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• The novel is never really in the first draft. The novel really happens in the revisions.

  Tama Janowitz

  Firsts, Novel, Happens

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• You may not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your attitude towards it, and this, paradoxically, alters reality. Try it and see.

  Margaret Atwood

  Attitude, Reality, Trying

  "Attitude". Margaret Atwood's commencement address at the University of Toronto, Canada, www.humanity.org. June 14, 1983.

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• The great thing about revision is that it's your opportunity to fake being brilliant.

  Will Shetterly

  Writing, Opportunity, Fake

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• First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to re-form it.... The first draft of a book is the most uncertain-where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better.

  Bernard Malamud

  Book, Ideas, Firsts

  Bernard Malamud, Lawrence M. Lasher (1991). “Conversations with Bernard Malamud”, p.59, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• But revision is a creative act, not merely an analytical imposition of rules of style on a more creative first draft. That's a myth - that the first draft is more creative and everything after that is ruining creativity.

  K. M. Soehnlein

  Creativity, Creative, Style

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Through revision, I enter the realm of the unspeakable and find the words that have eluded me.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Realms, Unspeakable

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I can’t write five words but that I change seven.

  Dorothy Parker

  Writing, Seven, Great Author

  Dorothy Parker, Stuart Y. Silverstein (2009). “Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker”, p.47, Simon and Schuster

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• That's the magic of revisions - every cut is necessary, and every cut hurts, but something new always grows.

  Kelly Barnhill

  Hurt, Cutting, Magic

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